iRamble about iStuff (Arduino/CoCo stuff now at www.subethasoftware.com)

More tech whiners: Dongles

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

Tech pundits are complaining about new Macs that only come with a USB-C port. “We have to have dongles for everything!” And the sky is falling.

I think back to 1998, when the original Bondi blue iMac came it. It had no floppy drive. It has no parallel printer port. It had no RS232 serial port. It had no ADB (some kind of Apple port; I never had any Apple stuff before the iMac so it meant nothing to me).

To hook up a modem, you needed a USB adapter (much more than just a dongle).

To hook up a parallel printer, you needed a USB adapter.

To hook up a SCSI hard drive, or a serial mouse, or an ADB accessory, or anything else … you needed a USB adapter.

And I remember that the Tech Whiners whined about this back then, too. And there was pain. USB adapters were expensive and sparse.

But today, USB is on everything. No more dongles are needed.

You know what I bet? I bet USB-C will do that same thing, and soon everything will just be USB-C.

We’ve been down this road before, folks.

Can you imagine how many different ports you’d need on your Mac (or PC) if this had not happened? I guess that’s what the Tech Whiners want…